Design of Smart Street light and traffic system

Amit Madabhavi, Amit Bhavikatti, Saqeeb Bijapur, Raghavendra Chavan

Abstract Conventional street lighting systems are switched
ON/OFF at specific times of the day and the lights are glowed to
maximum intensity the whole time that the lights are switched
on. Such street lighting systems do not consider the external
factors such as ambient light conditions and the
traffic/pedestrian density to trigger its operations. The
consequence is that a huge portion of electrical energy is wasted
if the traffic/pedestrian density is low. Therefore, in this paper
with a concern towards global energy consumption, depleting
resources that produce electric energy and green environment
requirement, we propose a system to automate the triggering of
street lights based on traffic/pedestrian movement. With such a
system, optimum use of energy is ensured. The proposed system
is cost-effective as well. The initial investment towards this
project will be returned back within a short time.
Another step towards achieving a green and clean environment is
to minimize the air pollution. A significant contributor of polluted
air is the carbon gases thrown out by vehicles. In urban
environment, we can easily minimize the pollution caused by
automobiles by a efficient and effective way of dealing with
traffic signals. We observe in our cities that green signal time at a
traffic intersection is kept constant irrespective of the traffic
density at that particular road. In this paper, we propose a system
where we assign dynamic times for green signals completely
based on the present conditions of the traffic on that particular
stretch of road.
In this study, we use common resources in terms of hardware for
both of our system i.e. smart street lightning system and smart
traffic lights system. IR and LDR sensors are used to input the
data which gets processed in a Microcontroller which finally
controls the street light intensity and the timings of the traffic
lights based on vehicular and pedestrian movement and traffic
respectively.

KeywordsAutomated, Cost effective, Microcontroller, Street

lighting .

I.

INTRODUCTION

The project deals with the intelligent control of street lights

and traffic lights. The motivation behind the project is the ever
increasing demand of electric energy, fossil fuels and fast
depleting renewable energy sources. The street lights are
simply turned on in the evenings at a specific time and is
switched off at morning or they are manually turned on/off as
per the ambient lightning conditions. A huge amount of
electrical energy is drained wastefully as a result. As energy
saving technologies are becoming more important and of
increasing interest, we have studied various techniques and the
following system of intelligent street light and traffic lights is
proposed.
Some emerging technologies incorporate dimming of LED
street lights at midnight and brightening before dawn and

eventually switch off at dawn. Though this reduces the power

consumption, it is not optimal as it may cause inconvenience
to late night travelers. Hence, the idea of Smart Street Lights
technology became concrete [1]. If one hundred million street
lights exist, each street light consume 20W and a half of all
street lights always turn on in the whole world, 8760GWh
electric power, which is about 0.8% of annual consumption of
electric power in Japan. In the future, many developing
countries will install many street lights and consume much
electric power. Thus, to save electric power that is consumed
by street lights is important to reduce greenhouse gases[2].
The other part of our project focuses on saving fuel and
time that is wasted at traffic junctions without a smart and
efficient way to control the traffic at intersections.
One way to improve traffic flow and safety of the current
transport system is to introduce automation and intelligent
control methods to roadside infrastructure and vehicles[3].
To ensure a reliable transportation system it is important to
have an intelligent traffic control system. The very first step to
do that is to acquire traffic data. Traffic data may come from
different sensors. Some examples are use of induction loop,
infra-red light sensor, optical flow etc[4].
Our proposed project uses infrared sensors which are used
to detect the movement of traffic/pedestrians. Logic HIGH
signals are sent to the microcontroller when a vehicle crosses
the light wave coming out of the infrared sensor. The infrared
sensor receives the reflected light back from the vehicle and
this signal is processed in the microcontroller so as to control
the intensity of the streetlights.
The conventional traffic light system provides green signal
with equal times to all the vehicles irrespective of the traffic
density. But our proposed system will try to focus on
providing green signal for a larger amount of time to the lane
which has high traffic density compared to the lane which has
low traffic density. Thus, saving the fuel and time of the
people that would have been wasted if the old traffic light
system is employed.
But, here we propose a system that generates the traffic
light signals based on the vehicle density, contrary to the
old method of allotting the same time intervals to all
roads irrespective of their traffic density.
II. COMPONENTS OF PROPOSED SYSTEM
Figure 1 shows the components, by which our smart street
light and traffic system is realized.

1.Microcontroller (Arduino) - Microcontroller is the brain of

the entire system where the processing of inputs i.e. data LDR
and IR sensors are received and various conditions are
checked and a output to the street lights is sent in form of
binary signals.
2.Infrared Sensors - These are used to detect vehicular or
pedestrian movement on the street. These sensors are fixed at
a set distance above the ground. The sensors send the signals
to the microcontroller board whenever an automobile or
pedestrian passes in front of the sensor.
3.Light dependent Resistors (LDR) The resistance of the
LDR varies based on the light falling on it. If adequate amount
of light falls on LDR at dawn, it is programmed to turn off and
at dusk it is programmed to turn on if a fixed threshold of light
falls on it.
4.LED Lamps LED lamps are use as these consume lesser
power compared to sodium/mercury lamps. Two kinds of
LEDs are used One for streetlights and the other for traffic
signals.

III. METHODOLOGY
Figure 3 shows the conceptual flowchart of design for
smart street light system.
Figure 4 shows the conceptual flowchart of design for
smart traffic light system.

5.Power Source A power source of +5V is used to power the

arduino board and led lamps.
6.Real time Clock A real time clock a computer clock that
keeps track of the current time.
7.Voltage Regulator and step down transformer Voltage
regulator is used to convert and maintain a constant voltage
level. The step down transformer is used to convert the AC
voltage to DC as the board and the LEDs require DC power.

Acknowledgment
The authors wish to thank Prof. T.Y.Melligeri for their
consistent support and guidance for this project under
BLDEACET, Vijayapur, VTU.

References
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[4]

SMART STREET LIGHTS ,Deepak K .

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Smart Traffic Control System with Application of Image Processing
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BadruddojaMajumder.